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Read more about word and sentence stress and then click the + to tell one important takeaway from this reading.

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Word Stress and Sentence Stress | EnglishClub

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Discover the secret of clearly understanding and pronouncing spoken English

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Read more about what phonemes are, then click the + to add one sentence explaining what you think a phoneme is.

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They will also move onto words containing consonant clusters (two consonants placed together) such as trap (tr is a consonant cluster) or bump (mp is a consonant cluster). Both of these words each contain four phonemes as although consonant clusters involve letters being 'clustered' together, you can still hear the two separate sounds.

They will then start to learn that a word could have a sound in it that is made up of two letters, for example:

is made up of three phonemes: /b/ at the start, /oa/ in the middle and /t/ at the end.

The middle sound /oa/ is made up of two letters, so this is called a digraph. A digraph is a phoneme (single sound) that is made up of two letters. The digraph above, /oa/, is a vowel digraph, because it is made up of two vowels.

A digraph could be made up of consonants, for example:

The /ch/ in chip is a consonant digraph, where the two letters make up one single phoneme.

A single sound can also be made up of three letters, and this is called a trigraph. For example:

The /igh/ in this word is one sound that is made up of three letters, so this is a trigraph.

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They will also move onto words containing consonant clusters (two consonants placed together) such as trap (tr is a consonant cluster) or bump (mp is a consonant cluster). Both of these words each contain four phonemes as although consonant clusters involve letters being 'clustered' together, you can still hear the two separate sounds.

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Read more about linking and reductions and then click the + to give one idea for how you might teach linking and reductions in your classroom.

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Read more about intonation and then click the + to type in one way that intonation gives clues to meaning.

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It's no surprise that many teachers don't feel confident about tackling it in the classroom. When teaching grammar or lexis, we find ways of making the language accessible to our learners. How then to do this with intonation?

Can I improve my own awareness of intonation?

What is intonation?
Intonation is about how we say things, rather than what we say. Without intonation, it's impossible to understand the expressions and thoughts that go with words.
Listen to somebody speaking without paying attention to the words: the 'melody' you hear is the intonation. It has the following features:

It's divided into phrases, also known as 'tone-units'.

The pitch moves up and down, within a 'pitch range'. Everybody has their own pitch range. Languages, too, differ in pitch range. English has particularly wide pitch range.

Awareness of intonation aids communication.

Incorrect intonation can result in misunderstandings, speakers losing interest or even taking offence!

In each tone unit, the pitch movement (a rise or fall in tone, or a combination of the two) takes place on the most important syllable known as the 'tonic-syllable'. The tonic-syllable is usually a high-content word, near the end of the unit.

Provide learners with models - don't be afraid to exaggerate your intonation.

Let students compare two examples of the same phrase, eg: varied/flat intonation, English / L1.

Ask students to have a 2-minute conversation in pairs as 'robots' (elicit the word using a picture if necessary), i.e. with no intonation. When they then go back to speaking 'normally', point out that the difference is made by intonation - this is what gives movement to our voices.

Wh-word questions: falling intonation

Question-Tags: 'chat' - falling; 'check' - rising

Lists: rising, rising, rising, falling

Get students to imitate my intonation, but without words, just humming.

The first thing is for learners to recognise the effect of intonation changes. I say the word 'bananas' - firstly with an 'interested' intonation (varied tone); then 'uninterested' (flat). Students identify the two and describe the difference. We then brainstorm attitudes, such as 'enthusiastic', 'bored', 'surprised', 'relieved'. I say 'bananas' for these. Students then do the same in pairs, guessing each other's attitude.

This can be developed by asking students to 'greet' everybody with a particular attitude. At the end, the class identify each person's attitude. For younger learners, I use 'Mr Men' characters (Miss Happy, Mr Grumpy, Miss Frightened, etc.) Each student is allocated a character and, as above, they greet the class with that character's voice.

These patterns of pitch variation are essential to a phrase's meaning. Changing the intonation can completely change the meaning.

Example:

Say: 'It's raining'.

Now say it again using the same words, but giving it different meaning. You could say it to mean 'What a surprise!', or 'How annoying!',or 'That's great!'. There are many possibilities.

Why teach intonation?
Intonation exists in every language, so the concept we're introducing isn't new. However, learners are often so busy finding their words that intonation suffers. Yet intonation can be as important as word choice - we don't always realise how much difference intonation makes:

Though it's unlikely our learners will need native-speaker-level pronunciation, what they do need is greater awareness of intonation to facilitate their speaking and listening.

Can I improve my own awareness of intonation?
It's difficult to hear our own intonation. Choose somebody to listen to closely: as you listen, visualise the melody in your head, 'seeing' how it's divided into tone-units. Next time you do a class speaking activity, focus on your students' intonation. Are there students whose language is 'correct', but something doesn't sound right? Do they come across as boring or insincere? It may well be their pitch range isn't varied enough.

How I help my students
Awareness-raising
Some techniques I find useful for raising learners' awareness of intonation:

Intonation doesn't exist in isolation. So it makes sense to approach it together with other factors.

Intonation and grammar
Where patterns associating intonation and grammar are predictable, I highlight these to my students. I see these as starting-points, rather than rules.

Remember that intonation is relevant to any speaking activity, and makes interesting remedial/revision work.

Remember that students don't always have to 'know' we're focusing on intonation: every time I drill phrases they're hearing intonation models.

Provide realistic and clear contexts.

Avoid going into theory.

Help students find patterns / rules-of-thumb, wherever possible.

Use a consistent system for marking intonation on the board for example: arrow for tone; tonic-syllable in CAPITALS; double lines ( // ) for tone-unit boundaries.

Keep it positive and don't expect perfection. The last thing I'd want is to make my students so anxious about their intonation that they stop speaking!

Some examples are:

When practising these constructions, I include activities focusing specifically on intonation.

For example, Question-Tags: Students in groups are assigned jobs to mime to each other. Students make notes about what they think each person's job is. They then have to check they've understood the jobs: Students use rising/falling intonation question-tags depending how sure they are: 'You're a pilot, aren't you?'. At the end, students confirm their jobs.

Intonation and attitude
It's important that students are aware of the strong link between intonation and attitude, even if it's difficult to provide rules here.

Intonation and discourse

Learners' also need awareness of intonation in longer stretches of language. Here, we can give our learners clearer guidelines: 'new' information = fall tone; 'shared' knowledge = 'fall-rise'.

A simple shopping dialogue demonstrates this:

SK: Can I help you?
C: I'd like a chocolate (fall) ice-cream.
SK: One chocolate (fall-rise) ice-cream. Anything else?
C: One strawberry (fall) ice-cream.
SK: One chocolate (fall-rise), one strawberry (fall-rise). Anything else?
C: Yes. One chocolate (fall-rise), one strawberry (fall-rise), and one vanilla (fall).

Higher level students can identify the 'new' / 'shared' information, and then practise reading accordingly.

With lower level students, we memorise the dialogue together. Although I don't refer to intonation directly, I use my hands to indicate it (fall = hand pointing down; fall-rise = down then up). Students then prepare their own dialogues. I've found my learners pick up these patterns very quickly.

Conclusion
When working on intonation in the classroom I:

Further reading
Sound Foundationsby Adrian Underhill
Pronunciationby Dalton and Seidlholfer
How to Teach Pronunciation by Gerald Kelly
Teaching English Pronunciationby Joanne Kenworthy

Marta J. Sabbadini, British Council, Cameroon

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It's no surprise that many teachers don't feel confident about tackling it in the classroom. When teaching grammar or lexis, we find ways of making the language accessible to our learners. How then to do this with intonation? Can I improve my own awareness of intonation? What is intonation?

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Read more about rhythm and then click the + to comment on the differences in rhythm in English versus your home language.

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The Rhythm of English

The rhythm of English words is closely linked with stress patterns in English. Once you know which word in the sentence needs stressing, you need to know which syllables to stress within each word.

You then need to learn how to use the syllables and rhythm alongside intonation in English to convey the exact meaning of your sentence and add subtlety and emotion to your speech.

Rhythm of Stress-Timed Language

English has a regular rhythm, with the sound of the language organised around the stressed syllables.

English is also a stress-timed language, which means that there is equal time spent on each stress within a sentence - and an equal time spent on gaps between syllables.

In this way, the unstressed syllables are constricted in length so that they fit into the timing and rhythm of the sentence.

Weak Syllables and Rhythm

All of this means that the unstressed syllables in English often sound very weak and can sometimes barely be heard at all.

These words are said to have a ' weak form ', as the speaker reduces the vowel and rushes over the sound in order to reach the next stressed word. Speakers do this to maintain the important rhythm of English.

In fact, the English language is interesting in the way it treats syllables and rhythm. The unstressed syllables can expand to fill more time between the stressed syllables in English. This is how the speaker creates the correct or expected rhythm.

Equally, the syllables can become shorter if there is less time between stresses. This syllable expansion and constriction happens so that the overall rhythm of the sentence remains constant. This constant rhythm in English is essential to the sound and feel of the language.

The unstressed syllables are always spoken more quickly than the stressed syllables, which also helps the listener to focus on the most important (stressed) words.

Rather than thinking about the syllables themselves, this distinctive English rhythm is all about the gaps between the syllables.

All the gaps between syllables last for roughly the same length of time because the sentence is stressed-timed. This is how the natural rhythm of English is created and it is how native listeners can understand the sentences so quickly, even if they miss some of the words.

The listener is not only listening for the individual words, they are also listening for their expected and distinctive rhythm, their music or melody, which enables fast comprehension.

The Rhythm of English for Native Speakers

In fact, native speakers of English are so accustomed to the rhythm of the English language that the weak sounds of the unstressed words are not a language problem.

Even if English speakers do not hear all the unstressed words in a sentence, they can still guess the missing words from the overall rhythm of English.

For example, in the sentence:

'The cat sat on the mat while eating its favourite food '

The stressed words are the words in bold. 'Eat', 'mat' and 'food' are all only one syllable, so these are easy to pronounce. The word 'eating' has two syllables so you need to know this is pronounced with the stress on the first half of the word (' eat ing').

However, the unstressed 'ing' ending of the word 'eating' still needs to be stressed more than the less important words in the sentence. This creates the regular stress-timed rhythm of English.
The problem of rhythm in language learning
English speakers have a problem when learning other languages as they naturally want to apply their own English rhythm to the new language. This is a similar problem for all language learners.

However, each language has its own rhythm that must be learned along with the grammar and vocabulary.

Understanding the rhythm of a language is a vital part of being understood by natives and necessary to achieving fluency.

Rhythm of Formal English Language

Different types of language require different stresses in English. Formal language, such as a speech about a pressing topic, such as politics, often has more stressed syllables.

This is because there tend to be more important words in a powerful speech. Informal speech tends to have fewer stresses because there are fewer important words.

An example with formal language:

'The whole country needs to take notice of the serious fall in literacy rates, which undermine educational standards '

This sentence contains many stressed words because it has a serious point to make. The syllables in the sentence are evenly spaced and the gaps between the stressed syllables will also be the same length.

This means that the words 'needs to', 'of the', 'in' and 'which' will all take up the same amount of time when the sentence is spoken, even though 'in' and 'which' only contain one syllable, while the others contain two.

Rhythm of Informal English Language

Another example of word stress (and word importance) with informal language:

This is the television programme that taught us how to make the best cakes for summer '

This sentence stresses the words ' television programmes ', 'taught', 'cakes' and 'summer'. The other words have to fit into the rhythm of the sentence, which is based around the stressed syllables.

Here is the stress pattern using British English, where O is a stressed syllable and - is an unstressed (or weak) syllable:
O - - / - - O - - - / - O - - - / - - - O / - O -
This is the / tele vision programme / that taught us how to / make the best cakes / for sum mer'

Rhythm is strongly linked with stress and intonation. English language learners need to become familiar with all these aspects of the English language to move towards a greater level of fluency.

Taken together, stress, rhythm and intonation form the necessary components of good English pronunciation.

Learning about the rhythm of English can actually be a really fun part of language learning as this is where the language can come to life and develop its personality.

When learners start to understand the connection between sounds and successfully replicate the rhythms of English, they find that native speakers are much quicker to understand them.

This improves your motivation as you can feel your fluency increasing. This is great news for your speaking skills as you develop your 'feel' for the language - the rhythm of English is at the heart of the language after all!

Read more about how intonation in English relates to the rhythm of the language.

What do you think about the rhythm of English?

Do you have any tips for improving the rhythm of English in your speech?

What do you find the hardest or strangest part of English rhythm?

Is the rhythm of English very different from the rhythm of your own native language?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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The Rhythm of the English Language - Pronunciation Guide

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The rhythm of English words is closely linked with stress patterns in English. Once you know which word in the sentence needs stressing, you need to know which syllables to stress within each word. You then need to learn how to use the syllables and rhythm alongside intonation in English to convey the exact meaning of your sentence and add subtlety and emotion to your speech.